I
The night was filled with vanilla and frangipanni odours and the
endless sound of the rollers on the reef. Somewhere away back amidst
the trees a woman was singing, the tide was out, and from the verandah
of Lygon’s house, across the star-shot waters of the lagoon, moving
yellow points of light caught the eye. They were spearing fish by
torchlight in the reef pools.
It had been a shell lagoon once, and in the old days men had come to
Tokahoe for sandal wood; now there was only copra to be had, and just
enough for one man to deal with. Tokahoe is only a little island where
one cannot make a fortune, but where you may live fortunately enough if
your tastes are simple and beyond the lure of whisky and civilisation.
The last trader had died in this paradise, of whisky, or gin—I forget
which—and his ghost was supposed to walk the beach on moonlight
nights, and it was apropos of this that Lygon suddenly put the question
to me “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Do you?” replied I.
“I don’t know,” said Lygon. “I almost think I do, because every one
does. Oh, I know, a handful of hard-headed super-civilised people say
they don’t, but the mass of humanity does. The Polynesians and
Micronesians do; go to Japan, go to Ireland, go anywhere, and
everywhere you will find ghost believers.”
“Lombrosso has written something like that,” said I.
“Has he? Well it’s a fact, but all the same it’s not evidence, the
universality of a belief scorns to hint at reality in the thing
believed in—yet what is more wanting in real reason than tabu. Yet
tabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an artu tree
because artu trees are tabu to them, or eat turtle or touch a dead
body. Well, look at the Jews; a dead body is tabu to a Cohen. India
is riddled with the business, so’s English society—it’s all the same
thing under different disguises.
“Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when
I asked you did you believe in ghosts I had a ghost story in mind and
tabu comes into it. This is it.”
And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon.
Some fifty years back when Pease was a pirate bold, and Hayes in his
bloom, and the topsails of the Leonora a terror to all dusky
beholders, Maru was a young man of twenty. He was son of Malemake, King
of Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round and
without a middle—an atoll island, in short; just a ring of coral, sea
beaten and circling, like a bezel, a sapphire lagoon.
Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago where the
currents run every way and the trades are unaccountable. The
underwriters to this day fight shy of a Paumotus trader, and in the
’60’s few ships came here and the few that came were on questionable
business. Maru up to the time he was twenty years of age only
remembered three.
There was the Spanish ship that came into the lagoon when he was seven.
The picture of her remained with him, burning and brilliant, yet tinged
with the atmosphere of nightmare, a big topsail schooner that lay for a
week mirroring herself on the lagoon-water whilst she refitted, fellows
with red handkerchiefs tied round their heads crawling aloft and laying
out on the spars. They came ashore for water and what they could find
in the way of taro and nuts, and made hay on the beach, insulting the
island women till the men drove them off. Then when she was clearing
the lagoon a brass gun was run out and fired, leaving a score of dead
and wounded on that salt white strand.
That was the Spaniard. Then came a whaler who took what she wanted and
cut down trees for fuel and departed, leaving behind the smell of her
as an enduring recollection, and lastly, when Maru was about eighteen,
a little old schooner slank in one early morning.
She lay in the lagoon like a mangy dog, a humble ship, very unlike the
Spaniard or the blustering whaleman. She only wanted water and a few
vegetables, and her men gave no trouble; then, one evening, she slank
out again with the ebb, but she left something behind her—smallpox. It
cleared the island, and of the hundred and fifty subjects of King
Malemake only ten were left—twelve people in all, counting the king and
Maru.
The king died of a broken heart and age, and of the eleven people left
three were women, widows of men who had died of the smallpox.
Maru was unmarried, and as the king of the community he might have
collected the women for his own household. But he had no thought of
anything but grief, grief for his father and the people who were gone.
He drew apart from the others, and the seven widowers began to arrange
matters as to the distribution of the three widows. They began with
arguments and ended with clubs: three men were killed, and one of the
women killed another man because he had brained the man of her fancy.
Then the dead were buried in the lagoon—Maru refusing to help because
of his tabu—and the three newly married couples settled down to live
their lives, leaving Maru out in the cold. He was no longer king. The
women despised him because he hadn’t fought for one of them, and the
men because he had failed in brutality and leadership. They were a hard
lot, true survivals of the fittest, and Maru, straight as a palm tree,
dark eyed, gentle, and a dreamer seemed, amongst them, like a man of
another tribe and time.
He lived alone, and sometimes in the sun blaze on that great ring of
coral he fancied he saw the spirits of the departed walking as they had
walked in life, and sometimes at night he thought he heard the voice of
his father chiding him.
When the old man died Maru had refused to touch the body or help in its
burial. Filial love, his own salvation nothing would have induced Maru
to break his tabu.
It was part of him, an iron reef in his character beyond the touch of
will.
II
One morning some six weeks after all this marrying and settling down a
brig came into the lagoon. She was a blackbirder, the Portsoy, owned
and captained by Colin Robertson, a Banffshire man, hence the name of
his brig. Robertson and his men landed, took off water, coconuts,
bananas, and everything else they could find worth taking. Then they
turned their attention to the population. Four men were not a great
find, but Robertson was not above trifles. He recruited them; that is
to say, he kicked them into his boat and took them on board the
Portsoy, leaving the three widows—grass widows now—wailing on the
shore. He had no fine feelings about the marriage tie and he reckoned
they would make out somehow. They were no use to him as labour and they
were ill-flavored; all the same, being a man of gallantry and some
humour, he dipped his flag to them as the Portsoy cleared the lagoon
and breasted the tumble at the break.
Maru standing aft saw the island with the white foam fighting the coral
and the gulls threshing around the break, saw the palms cut against the
pale aquamarine of the skyline that swept up the burning blue of the
noon, heard the long rumble and boom of the surf on the following wind,
and watched and listened till the sound of the surf died to nothingness
and of the island nothing remained but the palm tops, like pinheads
above the sea dazzle.
He felt no grief, but there came to him a new and strange thing, a
silence that the shipboard sounds could not break. Since birth the
eternal boom of the waves on coral had been in his ears, night and day
and day and night—louder in storms, but always there. It was gone.
That was why, despite the sound of the bow wash and boost of the waves
and the creak of cordage and block, the brig seemed to have carried
Maru into the silence of a new world.
They worked free of the Paumotus into the region of settled winds and
accountable currents, passing atolls, and reefs that showed like the
threshing of a shark’s tail in the blue, heading north-west in a world
of wind and wave and sky, desolate of life and, for Maru, the land of
Nowhere.
So it went on from week to week, and, as far as he was concerned, so it
might have gone on for ever. He knew nothing of the world into which he
had been suddenly snatched, and land which was not a ring of coral
surrounding a lagoon was for him unthinkable.
He knew nothing of navigation, and the brass-bound wheel at which a
sailor was always standing with his hands on the spokes, now twirling
it this way, now that, had for him a fascination beyond words, the
fascination of a strange toy for a little child, and something more. It
was the first wheel he had ever seen and its movements about its axis
seemed magical, and it was never left without someone to hold it and
move it—why? The mystery of the binnacle into which the wheel-mover
was always staring, as a man stares into a rock pool after fish, was
almost as fascinating.
Maru peeped into the binnacle one day and saw the fish, like a
starfish, yet trembling and moving like a frightened thing. Then some
one kicked him away and he ran forward and hid, feeling that he had
pried into the secrets of the white men’s gods and fearing the
consequences.
But the white men’s gods were not confined to the wheel and binnacle;
down below they had a god that could warn them of the weather, for that
day at noon, and for no apparent reason, the sailors began to strip the
brig of her canvas. Then the sea rose, and two hours later the cyclone
seized them. It blew everything away and then took them into its calm
heart, where, dancing like giants in dead still air, and with the sea
for a ballroom floor, the hundred-foot-high waves broke the Portsoy
to pieces.
Maru alone was saved, clinging to a piece of hatch cover, half stunned,
confused, yet unafraid and feeling vaguely that the magic wheel and the
trembling fish god had somehow betrayed the white men. He knew that he
was not to die, because this strange world that had taken him from his
island had not done with him yet, and the sea, in touch with him like
this, and half washing over him at times, had no terror for him, for he
had learned to swim before he had learned to walk. Also his stomach was
full; he had been eating biscuits whilst the Portsoy’s canvas was
being stripped away though the wind was strong enough almost to whip
the food from his hands.
The peaceful swell that followed the cyclone was a thing enough to have
driven an ordinary man mad with terror. Now lifted hill high on a
glassy slope, the whole wheel of the horizon came to view under the
breezing wind and blazing sun, then gently down-sliding the hatch cover
would sink to a valley bottom only to climbing again a glassy slope and
rise again hill-high into the wind and sun. Foam flecks passed on the
surface and in the green sun-dazzled crystal of the valley floors he
glimpsed strips of fucus floating face down, torn by the storm from
their rock attachments, and through the sloping wall of glass up which
the hatch cover was climbing he once glimpsed a shark, lifted and
cradled in a ridge of the great swell, strange to see as a fly in amber
or a fish in ice.
The hatch cover was sweeping with a four-knot current, moving with a
whole world of things concealed or half-seen or hinted at. A sea
current is a street, it is more, it is a moving pavement for the people
of the sea; jelly fish were being carried with Maru on the great swell
running with the current, a turtle broke the water close to him and
plunged again, and once a white roaring reef passed by only a few cable
lengths. He could see the rock exposed for a moment and the water
closing on it in a tumble of foam.
IV
Talia, that was her name, and though her language was different from
the tongue of Maru, it had a likeness of a sort. In those days that
little island was uncharted and entirely desolate but for the gulls of
the reef and the birds of the woods, and it was a wonderland to Maru,
whose idea of land as a sea-beaten ring of coral was shattered by woods
that bloomed green as a sea cave to the moonlight, high ground where
rivulets danced amidst the fern, and a beach protected from the outer
seas by a far-flung line of reefs. Talia to him was as wonderful as the
island; she had come to him out of the sea, she had saved his life, she
was as different from the women of the Paumotus as day from night. A
European would have called her beautiful, but Maru had no thought of
her beauty or her sex; she was just a being, beneficent, almost
divorced from earth, the strangest in the strange world that Fate had
seized him into, part with the great heaving swell he had ridden so
long, the turtle that had broken up to look at him, the sprouting reef,
the sunsets over wastes of water and the stars spread over the wastes
of sky.
He worshipped her in his way, and he might have worshipped her at a
greater distance only for the common bond of youth between them and the
incessant call of the world around them. Talia was practical. She
seemed to have forgotten her people and that island up north and to
live entirely in the moment. They made two shacks in the bushes and she
taught him island wood-craft and the uses of berries and fruit that he
had never seen before, also when to fish in the lagoon; for, a month
after they reached the island the poisonous season arrived and Talia
knew it, how, who can tell? She knew many things by instinct—the
approach of storms, and when the poisonous season had passed, the times
for fishing; and little by little their tongues, that had almost been
divided at first, became almost one so that they could chatter together
on all sorts of things and she could tell him that her name was Talia
the daughter of Tepairu, that her island was named Makea, that her
people had twenty canoes, big ones, and many little ones, and that
Tepairu was not the name of a man, but a woman. That Tepairu was queen
or chief woman of her people now that her husband was dead.
And Maru was able to tell her by degrees of what he could remember, of
the old Spanish ship and how she spouted smoke and thunder and killed
the beach people, of his island, and its shape—he drew it on the sand,
and Talia, who knew nothing of atolls at first, refused to believe in
it, thinking he was jesting. Of his father, who was chief man or king
of Fukariva, and of the destruction of the tribe. Then he told of the
ship with the little wheel—he drew it on the sand—and the little fish
god, of the centre of the cyclone where the waves were like white
dancing men, and of his journey on the hatch cover across the blue
heaving sea.
They would swim in the lagoon together right out to the reefs where the
great rollers were always breaking, and out there Talia always seemed
to remember her island, pointing north with her eyes fixed across the
sea dazzle, as though she could see it, and her people and the twenty
canoes beached on the spume-white beach beneath the palms.
“Some day they will come,” said Talia. She knew her people, those sea
rovers, inconsequent as the gulls; some day for some reason or none,
one of the fishing canoes would fish as far as this island, or be blown
there by some squall; she would take Maru back with her. She told him
this.
The thought began to trouble Maru. Then he grew gloomy. He was in love.
Love had hit him suddenly. Somehow and in some mysterious manner she
had changed from a beneficent being and part of a dream to a girl of
flesh and blood. She knew it, and at the same moment he turned for her
into a man.
Up to this she had had no thought of him except as an individual, for
all her dreams about him he might as well have been a palm tree; but
now it was different, and in a flash he was everything. The surf on the
reef said Maru, and the wind in the trees, Maru, and the gulls fishing
and crying at the break had one word, Maru, Maru, Maru.
Then one day, swimming out near the bigger break in the reefs, a
current drove them together, their shoulders touched and Maru’s arm
went round her, and amidst the blue laughing sea and the shouting of
the gulls he told her that the whole world was Talia, and as he told
her and as she listened the current of the ebb like a treacherous hand
was drawing them through the break towards the devouring sea.
They had to fight their way back; the ebb just beginning would soon be
a mill race, and they knew, and neither could help the other. It was a
hard struggle for love and life against the enmity against life and
love that hides in all things, from the heart of man to the heart of
the sea, but they won. They had reached calm waters and were within
twenty strokes of the beach when Talia cried out suddenly and sank.
Maru, who was slightly in front, turned and found her gone. She had
been seized with cramp, the cramp that comes from over-exertion, but he
did not know that. The lagoon was free of sharks, but despite that fact
and the fact that he did not fear them, he fancied for one fearful
moment that a shark had taken her.
Then he saw her below, a dusky form on the coral floor, and he dived.
He brought her to the surface, reached the sandy beach, and carrying
her in his arms ran with her to the higher level of the sands and
placed her beneath the shade of the trees; she moved in his arms as he
carried her, and when he laid her down her breast heaved in one great
sigh, water ran from her mouth, her limbs stiffened, and she moved no
more.
Then all the world became black for Maru; he knew
nothing of the art of resuscitating the drowned. Talia was dead.
He ran amongst the trees crying out that Talia was dead, he struck
himself against tree boles and was tripped by ground lianas; the things
of the forest seemed trying to kill him too. Then he hid amongst the
ferns, lying on his face and telling the earth that Talia was dead.
Then came sundown and after that the green moonlight of the woods, and
suddenly sleep, with a vision of blue laughing sea and Talia swimming
beside him, and then day again, and with the day the vision of Talia
lying dead beneath the trees. He could not bury her. He could not touch
her. The iron reel of his tabu held firm, indestructible, unalterable
as the main currents of the sea.
He picked fruits and ate them like an animal and without knowing that
he ate, torn towards the beach by the passionate desire to embrace once
more the form that he loved, but held from the act by a grip ten
thousand years old and immutable as gravity or the spirit that lives in
religions.
He must not handle the dead. Through all his grief came a weird touch
of comfort, she had not been dead when he carried her ashore. He had
not touched the dead.
Then terrible thoughts came to him of what would happen to Talia if he
left her lying there. Of what predatory gulls might do. He had some
knowledge of these matters, and past visions of what had happened on
Fukariva when the dead were too numerous for burial came to him, making
him shiver like a whipped dog. He could, at all events, drive the birds
away, without touching her, without even looking at her; his presence
on the beach would keep the birds away. It was near noon when this
thought came to him. He had been lying on the ground, but he sat up
now, as though listening to this thought. Then he rose up and came along
cautiously amongst the trees. As he came the rumble of the reef grew
louder and the sea wind began to reach him through the leaves, then the
light of the day grew stronger, and slipping between the palm boles he
pushed a great bread-fruit leaf aside and peeped, and there on the
blinding beach under the forenoon sun, more clearly even than he had
seen the ghosts of men on Fukariva, he saw the ghost of Talia walking
by the sea and wringing its hands.
Then the forest took him again, mad, this time, with terror.
When on Fukariva he had seen the ghosts of men walking in the sun blaze
on the coral he had felt no terror; he had never seen them except on
waking from sleep beneath some tree, and the sight of them had never
lasted for more than a moment. He had said to himself, “they are the
spirits of the departed,” and they had seemed to him part of the scheme
of things, like reflections cast on the lagoon, or the spirit voices
heard in the wind, or dreams, or the ships that had come from Nowhere
and departed Nowhere.
But the ghost of Talia was different from these. It was in some
tremendous way real, and it wept because the body of Talia lay unburied.
He had made it weep.
He alone could give it rest.
Away, deep in the woods, hiding amongst the bushes, springing alive
with alarm at the slightest sound, he debated this matter with himself;
and curiously, now, love did not move him at all or urge him—it was as
though the ghost of Talia had stepped between him and his love for
Talia, not destroying it, but obscuring it. Talia for him had become
two things, the body he had left lying on the sand under the trees and
the ghost he had seen walking on the beach; the real Talia no longer
existed for him except as the vaguest wraith. He lay in the bushes
facing the fact that so long as the body lay unburied the ghost would
walk. It might even leave the beach and come to him.
This thought brought him from his hiding-place—he could not lie alone
with it amongst the bushes, and then he found that he could not stand
alone with it amongst the trees, for at any moment she might appear
wringing her hands in one of the glades, or glide to his side from
behind one of the tree boles.
He made for the southern beach.
Although unused to woods till he reached this island, he had the
instinct for direction, a brain compass more mysterious than the
trembling starfish that had directed the movements of the wheel on
board the Portsoy. Making due south amidst the gloom of the trees, he
reached the beach, where the sun was blazing on the sands and the birds
flying and calling over the lagoon. The reef lay far out, a continuous
line unlike the reefs to the north, continuous but for a single break
through which the last of the ebb was flowing out oilily, mirroring a
palm tree that stood like the warden of the lagoon. The sound of the
surf was low, the wind had died away, and as Maru stood watching and
listening, peace came to his distracted soul.
He felt safe here. Even when Talia had been with him the woods had
always seemed to him peopled with lurking things, unused as he was to
trees in great masses; and now released from them and touched again by
the warmth of the sun he felt safe. It seemed to him that the ghost
could not come here. The gulls said it to him and the flashing water,
and as he lay down on the sands the surf on the reef said it to him. It
was too far away for the ghost to come. It seemed to him that he had
travelled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme
youth, losing everything on the way but a weariness greater than time
could hold or thought take recognition of.
Then he fell asleep, and he slept whilst the sun went down into the
west and the flood swept into the lagoon and the stars broke out above.
That tremendous sleep, unstirred by the vaguest dream, lasted till the
dawn was full.
Then he sat up, renewed, as though God had remade him in mind and body.
A gull was strutting on the sands by the water’s edge, it’s long shadow
strutting after it, and the shadow of the gull flew straight as a
javelin into the renewed mind of Maru. Talia was not dead. He had not
seen her ghost. She had come to life and had been walking by the sea
wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had
seen walking on the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now.
Ghosts do not cast shadows.
And instantly his mind, made reasonable by rest and sleep, revisualized
the picture that had terrified his mind distraught by grief. That was a
real form—what folly could have made him doubt it! Talia was
alive—alive, warm, and waiting for him on the northern beach, and the
love for her that fear had veiled rushed in upon him and seized him
with a great joy that made him shout aloud as he sprang to his feet,
yet with a pain at his heart like the pain of a rankling spear wound as
he broke through the trees shouting as he ran. “Talia! Talia! Talia!”
He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns; he heard the
sound of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the leaves
divide and the blare of light and morning splendour on the northern
sands and lagoon and sea.
He stood and looked.
Nothing.
He ran to the place where he had laid her beneath the trees; there was
still faintly visible the slight depression made by her body, and close
by, strangely and clearly cut, the imprint of a little foot.
Nothing else.
He stood and called and called, and no answer came but the wood echo
and the sound of the morning wind, then he ran to the sea edge. Then he
knew.
The sand was trodden up, and on the sand, clear cut and fresh, lay the
mark left by a beached canoe and the marks by the feet of the men who
had beached her and floated her again.
They had come—perhaps her own people—come, maybe, yesterday whilst he
was hiding from his fears debating with his tabu—come, and found
her, and taken her away.
He lunged into the lagoon and swimming like an otter and helped by the
outgoing tide, reached the reef. Scrambling on to the rough coral,
bleeding from cuts but feeling nothing of his wounds, he stood with
wrinkled eyes facing the sea blaze and with the land breeze blowing
past him out beyond the thundering foam of the reef to the blue and
heaving sea.
Away from the north, like a brown wing tip, showed the sail of a canoe.
He watched it. Tossed by the lilt of the swell it seemed beckoning to
him. Now it vanished in the sea dazzle, now reappeared, dwindling to a
point, to vanish at last like a dream of the sea, gone, never to be
recaptured.
“And Maru?” I asked of Lygon, “did he ever——”
“Never,” said Lygon “The islands of the sea are many. Wait.” He struck
a gong that stood close to his chair, struck it three times, and the
sounds passing into the night mixed with the voices of the canoe men
returning from fishing on the reef.
Then a servant came on to the verandah, an old, old man, half bent like
a withered tree.
“Maru,” said Lygon, “you can take away these glasses—but, one moment,
Maru, tell this gentleman your story.”
“The islands of the sea are many,” said Maru, like a child repeating a
lesson. He paused for a moment as though trying to remember some more,
then he passed out of the lamplight with the glasses.
“A year ago he remembered the whole story,” said Lygon.
But for me the whole story lay in those words, that voice, those
trembling hands that seemed still searching for what the eyes could see
no more.
